The present technology relates to an information processing apparatus capable of encoding a moving image, to an information processing system including the information processing apparatus, and to an information processing method and a program for the information processing apparatus.
With the development of broadband technology in recent years, the number of users who utilize a distribution service of moving image content via a network has been increasing year by year. Such moving image content is created by authoring. This work is conducted mainly by an authoring studio. The authoring studio compresses audio and video and combines the compressed audio and video into a single content product (authoring).
A video compression tool used in this authoring process is called authoring video encoder. The authoring video encoder has to meet a particular need of the studio unlike a general video encoder. For example, regarding the image quality, uniformity of the image quality in temporal and spatial directions is regarded as important and a movie producer or the like has an obsession with noise expression and the like even in regions which ordinary people does not care about.
In addition, for a codec of the video encoder, a AVC (MPEG4 advanced video coding/H.264) or HEVC (ISO/IEC 23008-2 high efficiency video coding/H.265) having a high encoding efficiency is used. These codecs include many tool for increasing the encoding efficiency and the tools are dependent on one another. Therefore, it is difficult to predict an encoding result (image quality).
Thus, for realizing the studio-level image quality, it is necessary to determine a combination of encoding tools by trial and error and perform encoding again and again. Specifically, for the encoding processing, a so-called multi-pass encoding method is used. Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2008-072591 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 1) has disclosed an encoding apparatus using a multi-pass encoding method.